Grower says EWG postings only partially true

Apr 12, 2002

The Environmental Working Group claims that posting payment information on the Internet just demonstrates that farm programs are “heavily tilted in favor of the biggest producers.” But many farmers are convinced the postings have only confused the issue — either accidentally or on purpose, depending on what motives you impute to the Washington-based EWG. Aside from the fact EWG never points out that the payments mainly follow production, it makes no distinctions between who receives the payments.

“The Grassley-Dorgan amendment was passed in large part due to the Environmental Working Group statistics regarding the concentration of payments in the top 10 percent of recipients,” a farmer writes. “These are greatly distorted by the number of share-rent landlords included in the data base.”

The writer notes that in summarizing the data for Richland Parish in Louisiana, the EWG says the farm programs are unfair because the top 10 percent received 70 percent of the payments. “What they don't say is that almost every producer in Richland Parish is included in the top 10 percent of recipients,” he noted. “The bottom 90 percent are almost entirely share-rent landlords who receive a portion of farm program payments as part of their rental agreement.”

Looking at the concentration of program payments to those recipients that are actually producers, the top 10 percent receive about 20 percent of the payments, he said. “This is a much more accurate portrayal of the concentration of benefits to the top 10 percent of farmers in Richland Parish, but it would not have created the type of outrage that the Environmental Working Group was seeking.”

On its Web site, the EWG says, “robust programs are needed to support farmers' incomes while helping them protect natural resources and the environment. But we also think current policy has badly failed almost everyone in agriculture but the very largest producers of a few favored crops.

It's difficult to argue with such “motherhood and apple pie” statements. It's true that many farmers and ranchers don't receive government payments. What the EWG doesn't point out is that the organizations representing those farmers have never asked for such payments and, in some cases, have policies rejecting them.

In a recent e-mail complaining about our coverage of the EWG, a spokesman cited correspondence from small farmers applauding its posting of the information, confirming their suspicions that the programs are “heavily tilted to bigger producers.” But what does the EWG consider a small farmer? Someone with 50 acres?

Unfortunately, the EWG tries to paint with a very broad brush an issue that is extremely complex; one that could impact the futures of thousands of farmers whose mistake was trying to grow bigger to achieve the economies of scale government economists have been suggesting for decades.

I suspect that for all its protests to the contrary, the EWG shares the same agenda as other environmentalists: wiping out large-scale commercial agriculture, so that we can go back to some idyllic version of small organic farms that they somehow think can feed America and a share of the world's population.